Geometry is Pointless
by strange-charmed
Summary: The Doctor sees math as something simple, beautiful and artistic. Rose ... doesn't.


"Rose. That's wrong."

"What? But you _just_ said to …"

"No, Rose, what I said was – "

"Nevermind," she sighed, loosening her grip on the pencil and plunking it down on the table in an act of submission. "There's a reason I didn't get my A-levels. I wasn't cut out for it then, and I'm not cut out for it now."

She chuckled mirthlessly and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. She sighed and glanced up across the table of the TARDIS library at the hundreds of bookshelves surrounding them. _He must have a million books in here_ – _and none of them would make the least amount of sense to me_, she thought. Why she had ever agreed to let him teach her math, she'd never know …

"Now that is nonsense," he said, eyebrows raised in a way that would have made him look stern if she didn't know him so well. He crossed his arms and fixed her with a disbelieving look. "Math is simple. Anyone can do it."

_Easy for him to say_, she thought. Rose sank a little deeper into her chair, shrugging. "I'm bad with numbers, I don't have a 27th sense for it like you do," she said wearily, staring across the room.

He started to roll his eyes in response then seemed to note her dejected posture. His expression softened, and he paused. "Forget the numbers, Rose. They're just symbols. They're pictures – "

With a sudden motion, he bent down quickly beside her, brushing his hand over hers as he rescued the pencil from the table and began writing in the abandoned notebook. The thick leather of his jacket grazed her arm as he wrote, but he didn't seem to notice, eyes focused with rapt attention on the piece of paper. She scooted a few inches over to give him some room to write … whatever it was he was writing.

"Math isn't about numbers, Rose, it's about logic. The symbols can be anything, like this – "

He finished his scribbling and raised himself back up. Arms crossed, he looked down at her with a satisfied grin on his face as he nodded for her to look down at the notebook.

She followed his gaze to down to the paper, where he had drawn a square-root symbol with a happy-looking little smiley face inside. Despite herself, her mouth quirked as she attempted to hold back a smile of her own.

"So, Doctor," she said, biting back a laugh. "What _is_ the square root of a smiley face?"

"Rose … that's not the point."

"But you said it was logical!"

"Fine," he said with a sigh. "The square root of a smiley face is itself both a smiley face AND a frowny face. Have to account for the positive and negative values, you see," he said with a big grin that looked more like a smirk to Rose.

She paused, slightly mystified for a brief moment, then raised an eyebrow. "So, Doctor … the frowny face can _become_ a smiley face?"

He nodded, his smile widening. "Now you're getting it!"

"Explains quite a lot, that does," she said, glancing up at him with a chuckle.

His grin faded into a mock glare as Rose beamed merrily back at him.

"Anyway," he said with a pointed look. "Calculus is even easier. You use it to make better pictures. You know when you're trying to sketch something, maybe a face, but you can't get the lines quite right? You're trying to draw the slope of someone's shoulders, or eyes, or mouth, but the curves are a bit off and it doesn't look right?"

Rose nodded as he uncrossed his arms and snatched the pencil back up again, leaning over the table once more to draw something out for her.

"On Earth alone, there's Albrecht Durer, Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher. You lot think of them as great artists, but everything they drew was based on calculus. More than anything they were mathematicians," the Doctor said, pausing to look over at her. "Math is really about art. It's a way we can describe the universe as we see it, in a way that makes sense to other people when they look at it. You can use numbers, or smiley faces, or lines, but that's all it is. Like I said: simple."

Before she had a chance to respond, his eyes were focused back on the notebook and his scribbling continued. She tucked her arm inside his own and leaned into him, trying to look around his broad shoulders to get a peek as he worked. He angled himself away from her and she gave his arm a playful swat as she waited. He grinned back at her over his shoulder, and she met his smile with one of her own.

Finally – suddenly – he stood up, looking extremely pleased with himself as he surveyed his work. Rose's eyes immediately darted to the paper and she couldn't help but stare, transfixed. His smile faded slightly as he waited for her reaction.

She had a suspicion the drawing would be of her, and she wasn't mistaken. It was her – and him – positioned exactly as they had been a moment ago. In the sketch, she was smiling brightly, her head nestled into his shoulder, and her arm was snugly fit through his arm, as if drawing him closer. In turn, the picture showed him smiling back at her, with that look in his eyes that made her feel like she could do no wrong. In front of them lay a sketch of the notebook, inside of which was a smaller version of the two of them, and a smaller notebook, and so on …

"I … didn't know you could draw like that. That's … that's beautiful, Doctor," she said quietly.

"It's called an infinite loop," he said, his voice a little softer than it had been a minute ago.

"It's gorgeous … can I keep it?"

"If you want," he said, a slight flush coming to his cheeks. Ridiculous, that – Time Lords never blush. He gave her one last small grin and quickly turned to leave the room, calling over his shoulder. "Anyway, that's enough for now. It's just math. Like I've been telling you, it's simple."

As she looked down at the drawing of the two of them so comfortably huddled together, and looking so happy, she thought to herself with a smile: _Yes, I suppose it is._


End file.
